Straight (28 page)

We have been trained for a very long time, in other words, to consider “nontraditional” families troublesome at best and actively destructive at worst. The results of the matrix of economic, social, and civic privilege that has developed around the heterosexual nuclear household have long been taken as proof that such households are somehow inherently better and more successful. There are many, including the nonprofit advertising agency Campaign for Our Children, who continue to claim, using billboards, bus-side advertisements, radio, and more, that children of married parents are better off simply because their parents are married.[
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] But as the work of sociologists Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey indicates, much of the research that supposedly proves that unique benefits derive from having a parent of each biological sex—the traditional set of married heterosexual parents—mistakenly conflates parental sexes with parental numbers. It is more important that there be enough parents to go around than it is that those parents be of particular biological sexes.[
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] A recent study
by Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos in
Pediatrics
appears to confirm this, showing that the children of lesbian families seem, if anything, to be better adjusted and more successful than their peers who grow up with conventional, different-sex parents.[
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] Having same-sex parents, in other words, does not appear to be a liability for children's development.

This could be welcomed as a liberating moment, the confirmation that the biologically critical, socially central, and symbolically enormous task of parenting the next generation doesn't have to be limited to a particular kind of parent. Yet even in the pages of the fairly reserved
Atlantic,
male fear trumped egalitarian possibility: in its June/July 2010 issue, the
Atlantic
headlined its coverage of Biblarz and Stacey's research “Are Fathers Necessary?”

It might as well have been headlined “Is Heterosexuality Necessary?” The father-headed family has historically been the standard in Western culture, and practically the insignia of middle-class normalcy. The desire to mate with an opposite-sex partner to form such a family was, according to Krafft-Ebing, what made a person “heterosexual.” The father-headed nuclear family has a long track record of being the version of the family that is considered socially, politically, and scientifically correct. But when gametes can be harvested by needle and the spark of life transmitted in a petri dish, when children can be successfully and happily reared by parents who are not parts of a male-female dyad, then the monolith of heterosexuality loses two large blocks from its foundation. As the title of Robin Marantz Henig's 2004 book on the history of IVF,
Pandora's Baby,
suggests, modern innovations in the ways we can and do create new families have opened a culture-changing can of worms. What these brave new families will mean to the future of heterosexuality, of course, it is much too soon to say. Nevertheless, it is no longer really plausible, if indeed it ever was, to claim that heterosexuality is necessary for the creation of families and for the generation and rearing of children. Does heterosexuality need families and children to help validate its existence more than families and children need heterosexuality to validate theirs? It seems likely.

A TALE OF TWO SPOUSES

When jazz pianist and father of three Billy Tipton died in Spokane, Washington, in 1989, the American media exploded in shock: the seventy-five-year-old man was a woman. No one, it seems, knew this except Tipton himself. His children, informally adopted, had only ever known Tipton as their father. Tipton's five common-law wives, including his last wife, a former stripper named Kitty Oakes, apparently believed—and apparently had no reason to doubt—that a car accident in Tipton's youth had mangled his ribcage and genitals, leaving him impotent and necessitating the wearing of protective bandages.

Tipton's life had its ups and downs, like any other. His marriages tended not to work out well, and his last wife was abusive enough that Tipton ended up raising his youngest child as a solo father. His career was only modestly successful, much of it spent working out of Spokane's grand dame of a Gilded Age hotel, the Davenport. He was a loving parent, though, and he managed to make a consistent living in a notoriously fickle industry, not small things. Still, Billy Tipton's most impressive performance was his seamless and completely successful life as a man.

Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. After Tipton's death and the revelation of his biological sex, journalists and biographers would look at photos of the baby-faced Tipton and wonder how people could not have known. Tipton's ex-wives' claims that they had simply accepted his car-wreck story and adjusted to the (perhaps not entirely unwelcome) idea that the man in their lives was infertile and more interested in their pleasure than his own were weighed in the balance and found only barely credible. But the fact remains that Tipton's children, upon hearing that their father was a woman, were so stunned and hurt that two of them changed their last names.

More remarkable still was the legal reaction. After Kitty Oakes died in 2007, a Spokane County probate court upheld the Tipton children's rights of inheritance. In effect, by allowing Jonathan Clark, Scott Miller, and William Tipton Jr. to inherit, the court affirmed the legitimacy of a highly unorthodox family. The three children were biologically unrelated, both to one another and to their parents, and none were ever legally adopted. The parents were never legally married and were, in fact, both of the same biological sex. But with both Tipton and Oakes dead, the judge ruled, there was no reason to make
their children accountable for the fact that their parents had chosen not to play by the rules. The (Spokane)
Spokesman-Review
headline writer had quite a job composing a headline to convey it: “Judge: Billy Tipton's ‘Sons' Can Inherit Their ‘Mother's' Estate.”

It was a noteworthy decision. Washington law does not, ordinarily, permit illegally adopted children not named specifically in a will to inherit property. In this instance, however, the judge agreed with the attorney for Oakes's estate that, even though the three Tipton children knew they were adopted, and that Kitty Oakes was not their biological mother, “the Tiptons were a family.” For Superior Court judge Michael Price, being a family—regardless of paperwork, or even the parents' biological sexes—was, in the end, enough.

In the case of Christie Lee Littleton, on the other hand, being family was nowhere near enough. Nor was having done everything, including changing legal and physical sex, strictly by the book. Born male and christened Lee Cavazos in San Antonio, Texas, in 1952, Christie Lee Littleton felt from toddlerhood that she should have been female. This distressed her parents and the doctors to whom they took the child, but the regimens of male hormones to which Littleton was subjected in attempted masculinization therapy did not change her feelings. By the time Littleton was seventeen, she had begun to seek out a sex change, and when she was twenty-three, she managed to become part of a program at the University of Texas Health Science Center that would finally assist her in changing her hormones and her anatomy. In 1977, she changed her name to Christie Lee; in 1979, the genital surgeries that rendered her medically female were completed. In 1989, the happily female Christie Lee Cavazos, radiant in white lace, married Jonathan Mark Littleton in Kentucky, where they met and settled down to a pleasant, unremarkable life together, later moving back to Texas.

It should have been a “happily ever after” story, the kind of gender-normative, heterosexual marriage that conservative pundits praise as the backbone of traditional society. For seven years, it was. Then, tragically, Jonathan Mark Littleton died before his time. After a period of mourning her husband, Christie decided to open a case against her late husband's physician, Mark Prange, for medical malpractice leading to wrongful death.

Was there actual medical malpractice involved in Mr. Littleton's
death? We may never know. Certainly there has never been a verdict on the issue, for almost immediately, Mrs. Littleton's attempts to seek redress in the matter of her husband's death were derailed by something she surely thought she had put well behind her: her previous life of being identified as a man. Prange's lawyers' counterargument in the suit was a simple one. Christie Littleton, they argued, was not entitled to file suit as Jonathan Mark Littleton's next-of-kin, for the simple reason that the marriage between the two could not possibly have been valid. Because Mrs. Littleton had begun life as a boy, because her cells carried XY chromosomes, and because, as they argued, sex reassignment only changed the appearance and not the facts of biology, she could not be in a valid marriage to a biological man.

Determined to get her case heard, Christie Littleton and her lawyers pursued the case through multiple appeals. After the Texas Fourth Court of Appeals refused to acknowledge the validity of the Littleton marriage, Mrs. Littleton and her legal team took the case to the Texas State Supreme Court, in hopes that a review of the law being invoked in the case would have a positive result.

It failed. The US Supreme Court refused to review the case. For all intents and purposes, Christie Littleton has no recourse with regard to the death of her spouse, a state of affairs of which the federal judiciary apparently approves. Where things rest—at least in Texas—is that it is possible for a US state to decide that sex is determined solely by chromosomes, that it comes in two and only two types, and that it cannot be meaningfully legally changed, regardless of medical intervention.

This, as Christie Littleton and many commentators on the case have pointed out, is not only mean-spirited and reductive, but ignorant. The law, of course, is not obligated to be kind, and it is certainly not obligated to recognize the quality of “familyness” that appears to have moved the judge in the Tipton case. But one could make the argument, as indeed Christie Littleton and her legal team have tried to do, that the state should recognize the evidence that clearly demonstrates that sex is nowhere near a binary affair.

Biology, as it happens, agrees with Christie Littleton. Although the majority of people have sex chromosomes that match one of two primary types—XY for males, XX for females—a sizeable minority of people, including my own partner, as you may recall, have sex chromosomes of some other type. Or types: not only can an individual
have a single set of sex chromosomes that are neither XX or XY and can have, for instance, XXY or XYY or XO, but they may also have different sets of sex chromosomes in different cells due to the phenomena known as mosaicism and chimerism.[
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] My partner, who is both genetically intersex and an example of genetic mosaicism, has some cells with XY sex chromosomes and others with XXY. One wonders which one the court would consider authoritative? If my partner and I married in Texas, would our marriage be valid? It might, if the court, in its Solomonic wisdom, were to take the opinion that a single person's chromosomes could be split in half.

But even this would only make our marriage legally binding if my own sex chromosomes are what I assume them to be. Like most people, I do not actually know my own karyotype. It is quite possible that I, like hundreds of thousands of other people, have been intersex all my life and simply do not know it. No government, including that of Texas, has yet made getting a karyotype a prerequisite for applying for a marriage license. If Texas, or any other locality, is going to limit marriage to people whose genes conform to a particular pattern, this is a problem. People don't fall in love with chromosomes, after all. They don't have sex with chromosomes, and they certainly don't get married to chromosomes. Sex is more than genetics. Much more.

As medical technology gets more sophisticated, and we learn about even more varieties and variations of human biological sex, it becomes ever clearer that thinking of biological sex as binary may be convenient, but it is not accurate. This is also true when it comes to thinking of biological sex as fixed and unchanging. While it is true that, as the Texas Appeals Court wrote in October 1999, “The male chromosomes do not change with either hormonal treatment or sex reassignment surgery. Biologically a postoperative female transsexual is still a male,” it is also true that the scalpel cuts both ways. Anatomically, a transwoman who has undergone a vaginoplasty—the surgical removal of penis, scrotum, and testicles and the creation of a vagina and vulva—has functionally the same genital anatomy as any biological female who has had a hysterectomy. Two such women may also be very hormonally similar, given the tendency for post-hysterectomy patients to be given hormone replacement therapy.

Biology is not destiny. It isn't even necessarily permanent. Even if medical expertise and technology did not provide us with the means
to identify and understand nature's biological bounty and to create our own, gender would still be complex, multifarious, and unpredictable. As the historical record bears out, there have always been Billy Tiptons. Male privilege can be quite motivating: women have lived as men in order to follow God, obtain educations, join the professions, support their families, and go to war, in addition to doing it so that they could love other women without being persecuted. Historical examples of men living as women are thinner on the ground, probably in part because to abandon masculinity is to abandon power. Still, we know that men have lived as women, either temporarily or long-term, in order to escape from danger, to go undercover, and, in rare cases like that of the legendary eighteenth-century diplomat and spy the Chevalier d'Eon, apparently just because they wanted to.

Our culture has yet to come to grips with this. The hopeless hodgepodge of Western legal approaches to sex and gender is just one result of our incomplete grasp of sexuality. It makes no logical sense that Christie Littleton has been denied, rather vindictively it would seem, the same humane legal consideration of her social identity and marriage that Billy Tipton received posthumously.[
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]